Hardware is Richard Stanley's first feature film. Now available
on video, we look at the production of this exhilarating low
budget science fictioner.

Hardware is the first feature from 25 year old Richard Stanley.
Born in South Africa where his mother took him to see films
like Dracula and King Kong, Stanley was studying physiology
and anthropology when he came across the films of Dario
Argento. This channelled his interests "in the middle ground
between science and magic" towards amateur Super-8 movies.

He later attended Cape Town Film and Video School. Leaving
South Africa to avoid compulsory military service, he came to
England and began making a number of documentaries and short
films. His 'Rites Of Passage' won the Insitute Of Contempary
Arts School Trophy and the IAC Gold Seal Award for his
45-minute short, 'Incidents In an Expanding Universe.' His first
attempts at depicting the future mmaterialized as a series of pop
videos for Indie bands like Fields Of The Nephilim, Renegade
Soundwave and Pop Will Eat Itself. Never just straight
performance pieces, Stanley's promos were stuffed with movie
references from Spaghetti Westerns to horror movies. His promo
for PIL's "The Body" for example, is a 'big musical abortion
scene' in which a demented John Lydon (typecast again) waves
surgical implements while being wheeled down hospital corridors
on a trolley.

Having wrote the script for Hardware, he flew to Afghanistan
where he dropped acid and became involved in a local war in the
Hindu Kush mountains. Three months passed and war over,
Stanley made his way to northern Pakistan where a fax reached
him saying Palace Pictures were interested in making the film
from Stanley's script. Palace raised the 31 million and the
production was underway. Although based in Camden
Roundhouse, a former railway engine shed and drama and music
venue, the nine-week shoot used a number of other locations in
London.

In the developing Docklands Area, in the East End, the
production made use of the brutalist architecture of Spillers Flour
Mill. While there, the crew also took the opportunity to film the
water taxi sequence on the Thames. The art-deco foyer of the
Rainbow Theatre in North London served as the entrance hall of
Jill's apartment block. The last weeks of location shooting were
in Morocco. Director Stanley and producer Joanne Sellar took a
nine-person crew and two cast members, Stacey Travis (Jill) and
Carl McCoy (The Nomad) and scouted a location near
Quarzazate, where he legendary Bernardo Bertolucci was filming
his latest film 'The Sheltering Sky'. Eventually the small crew
settled in a place near Erfoud, a beautiful dune area on the edge
of the Sahara Desert.

Despite problems with sickness, the weather and dubious film
equipment dealers, the hard-pressed crew came home with
satisfactory footage. Joanne Sellars explains: "The first day was
cloudy but fine but on the second day the rain started. So we
shot most of the Nomad scenes with these interesting
thunderclouds in the background. We were very surprised about
the terrible weather. We apparently got the first floods for over
18 years." Paul Catling, the designer of Hardware's Mark 13
robot worked with Bob Keen (SPFX consultant on Hellraiser for
which he designed the corpulent 'Butterball' cenobite and Frank's
re-birth sequence. It was work like this, and in particular
Catling's 'Half-man' design for Jim Henson's 'The Storyteller',
which first caught the director's eye. Several versions of Mark 13
were used during filming, including two fibreglass suits and
some animatronic versions of the monster.

Two actors alternated in the fibreglass versions, because one
quickly became worn-out with wearing the heavy suit. The
animatronic version also proved to be somewhat problematic:
"One of the animatronic robots had a lot of powerful motors
inside it," says Catling, "and if there was any radio interference it
would go mad and it's so strong it just ripped itself apart."
Catling eventually overcame this dangerous erratic behaviour and
concentrated on Mark 13's style of movement, shooting it at
different speeds to give it an insect-like motion. Initially,
Hardware started out as more of a science fiction movie, but it
became more of a horror movie as it went along.

"To some extent, that happened while we were shooting," says
Stanley, "but also at the scripting stage. There were a lot of
things in the script which people found very scary, so we tried to
play them up a little bit more." Stanley hopes his sparring use of
blue back-lighting distinguishes Hardware from other futuristic
films like Ridley Scott's Bladerunner. Stanley preferred to go
back to horror rather than science fiction sources. Both he and
Steve Chivers (director of photography) had watched many of
Dario Argento's Italian Horror films and as a result used a lot of
red lighting. Experimenting as they shot, the lighting became
more and more abstract as they went along. The end result is an
interesting mix of styles.

As for the rest of Richard Stanley's career: "I've been working in
the same world for a long time now. I've had quite a few
separate projects which are all set in the same city, and there are
also a couple of recurring characters who appear in all of them.
Each time I've done it I've been able to add a little more detail to
the world, so in Hardware the background detail is pretty dense.
I just keep thinking about what's going to happen to this world,
what this society is going to be like in 48 years time. I've got a
feeling there may be some more excursions into the future."